Books of 2020-2021

One of my “Pandemic Positives” has been reading more non-fiction books. Pre-Pandemic I would probably describe my reading habits as “escapism”; I’d deliberately look for fiction, biographies and murder mysteries to distract me from a busy schedule of travel, speaking and writing.

During the Pandemic, with a very different schedule, I’ve gravitated to trying to learn more about different topics: food, hunger, health, thinking, behavior…So here are my 12 recommendations for you. One for each month …with a key quote from each that might pique your curiosity to read the book:

1. “Calories and Corsets: A history of dieting over 2,000 years” — — Louise Foxcroft — “New diets come and go but they’re always rehashed from the past…”
2. “Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know” — — Adam Grant — “It takes confident humility to admit that we’re a work in progress. It shows that we care more about improving ourselves that proving ourselves.”
3. “The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket” — Benjamin Lorr — “The grocery store felt like it was becoming a smug secular update. The seals and certifications acting like some sort of moral shield…”
4. “The American Plate: A Culinary History in 100 Bites” — — — — — Libby H. O’Connell — “Our food decisions impact not only our own lives, but the lives of people everywhere and for generations to come.”
5. “Bad Advice: Or Why Celebrities, Politicians, and Activists Aren’t Your Best Source of Health Information” — Paul A. Offit, M.D. — “Although science is under siege, science advocates are fighting back.”
6. “Burn: New Research Blows the Lid Off How We Really Burn Calories, Lose Weight, and Stay Healthy” — Herman Pontzer, PhD — “Exercise is a poor tool for achieving weight loss, but it does seem to help people maintain weight loss.”
7. “Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal” — Mary Roach — “Those who know the human gut intimately see beauty, not only in its sophistication but in its inner landscapes and architecture.”
8. “Hunger: An Unnatural History” — Sharman Apt Russell — “Appetite is desire, born of biology, molded by experience and culture.”
9. “Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine” — Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, MD — “Without evidence-based medicine, we risk falling into the trap of considering useless treatments as helpful, or helpful treatments as useless.”
10. “Ending Hunger: The Quest to Feed the World Without Destroying It” — Anthony Warner — “…it would be a brutally dystopian future if every time we gathered to eat, we had to consult some sort of algorithm to assess the impact of our diet upon the planet.”
11. “Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat” — — — — — Bee Wilson — — “Good cooking is a precise chemical undertaking. The difference between a truly great dinner and an indifferent one may be 30 seconds and 1/4 of a teaspoon of salt.”
12. “Food Isn’t Medicine: Challenge Nutrib*llocks and Escape the Diet Trap” — Dr. Joshua Wolrich — “The misconception that food is medicine makes it easier to believe that alot of the nutribollocks could be true…”